The overlap between adult literacy and ESOL. Anne McKeown 29 March 2011. Convergence. UK context, reflected in other countries How and in what ways have literacy and ESOL come together? Why? What is distinct to literacy or ESOL? What does it mean for practice?. Historical context.

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Ismail is from Somalia and has been in the UK for 12 years, since his early teens. His spoken English is fluent, and he speaks with a Somali-London accent... He mixes in a multicultural multilingual group of young people, using English as a lingua franca.

Ismail had an interrupted education in Somalia due to the civil war. He arrived in England speaking hardly any English and writing none. However, within a year he was fluent and he left school with 4 GCSEs, although the teachers had not been optimistic about his chances:

Some of the teachers …were predicting me like I’m not going to leave with no grades. My head of year. For the first of all they were saying this guy is going to leave with no grades. And he was shocked. Four GCSEs. (Laughs)

On leaving school, Ismail eventually got voluntary work which required him to write a report, so he decided to go back to study. He was eventually enrolled in an Entry 3 ESOL Literacy class in the ESOL department of a further education college.

“…learners of basic literacy in ESOL face different challenges to those of English born or schooled adult literacy learners, Though they may speak some English, they will not have the instinctive knowledge of English syntax, vocabulary or idiom that people reading their mothertongue would have and will not always have the cultural awareness needed to understand texts.”